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Former Firefox VP on What It's Like To Be Both a Partner of Google and a Competitor via Google Chrome (twitter.com)
Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, plans to build a $1 billion high-tech neighborhood in Toronto. The problem? It is facing an opposition from residents who have called for its demise. As the backlash gains momentum, it could force Sidewalk Labs to abandon or alter its vision. On paper, Sidewalk Labs' idea arguably has some merits: It wishes to "set new standards" for how cities are designed and built. But some are apprehensive of Google's plans, because the company has a knack for assuming more control over things and killing local competition.
Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.
But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible." All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say "hey what gives?" And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.
This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.
Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.
But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible." All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say "hey what gives?" And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.
This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.
And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. (...) There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.
Well, between accidents and malice there's indifference, like we're not actively planting booby traps for Firefox but we're also not doing compatibility or performance testing, we're not assigning the bugs a high priority... I have some such low-priority issues in my backlog that keep getting pushed back and back and back. It's technically not shelved, it just seems unlikely we'll ever get around to fixing it. And it certainly doesn't have the priority to do anything proactive. It's not very hard to understand the corporate priorities...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Isn't this whole bit about Google sabotaging Firefox performance, exactly the same thing we just heard from someone who used to be on the Microsoft Edge team?
At the time, folks around Slashdot were all like, "haw, haw, haw, karma's a bitch, eh there Billy?" Which is, of course, the easy and fun thing to say because of a predisposed hatred of Microsoft.
Now we see that Google has persistently been sabotaging Firefox as well. So maybe the problem wasn't Edge, after all.....
And given how many former Microsoft people are (or have been) at Google -- it's a four-digit number -- I'm really not surprised to see those sleazy late-90s Microsoft anticompetitive tactics show up once again.
They turned Mozilla into Mo$illa by paying them to remove XUL and other features. They cripple competition like Waterfox and Pale Moon by serving up outdated html and give them harder captchas. They even got Microsoft to chromify their browser. I repeat my calls for a truly independent browser foundation that tells Google to get lost.
In business, your competition IS your enemy. That's not an exaggeration. It's not life or death, but it's financial life or death. I work for a small, successful retailer, and we won't do business with Amazon. At all. We don't sell through them. We don't buy from them. We don't even buy company snacks at Whole Foods any more. Whether it has that much of a difference to either us or them is immaterial. We're in a financial fight for our lives, and we're not going to give up a penny or any information to our competition.
Mozilla shouldn't have anything to do with Google. Zero. They need to find some other way to sustain themselves other than sucking from the teat of the company that's trying to kill them (financially).
I don't respond to AC's.